Jolla shows off Sailfish OS

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If you consider choice a good thing, then you’ve probably been waiting excitedly to see what the team at Jolla has planned for its Sailfish OS. Today, you can take an early look at their efforts. Jolla is promising a mobile OS that’s unlike anything else on the market, with an emphasis on personalization, multitasking, and performance.

In the demo video that’s been posted, Jolla shows a lockscreen that looks a bit like a mix of BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone. A quartet of large, clean tiles dominate the display, and swipe gestures allow control over the apps they represent — for example, swiping the music app’s thumbnail reveals playback controls. In the gallery app, Sailfish allows setting wallpaper images by gently pulling down to scroll through a hidden menu at the top of the screen.

Those of you who hate having to press a button to wake up your phone will love one small Sailfish feature. Like the BlackBerry PlayBook, Jolla’s demo device can be awoken with a screen gesture — a double-tap anywhere on the surface, as opposed to RIM’s slide from edge to edge.

Apart from posting a teaser video that shows a brief glimpse of the OS, Jolla has also given a few members of the press a more personal look at Sailfish running on what looks like a Nokia N950. That doesn’t come as a complete surprise considering that Jolla rose from the ashes of Nokia’s MeeGo team. The N950 was Nokia’s official MeeGo developer handset and it was first shown off back in the summer of 2011. Unfortunately for MeeGo fans, it was never released to the general public.

Other good news around Sailfish this morning: ST Ericsson has pledged its support for Jolla’s efforts, and the company says that many Android apps will “just work” on the new platform. The Mer Project Wiki also offers a number of handy developer downloads already, including the SDK. That includes a virtual machine image that can be run inside an app like VirtualBox, so enterprising types with a penchant for compiling and bleeding-edge software can get involved with Sailfish OS right now.